I’ve been playing with Phaser recently and I’m really liking it so far. I plan to use TypeScript for the language as it has a bunch of advantages over straight javascript. I found the Phaser tutorial was a little out of date so figured I would put together a quick tutorial to help others get started with Phaser development in Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition using TypeScript. The new Community Edition of Visual Studio is free for commercial use which means anyone running Windows can start making WebGL games in Phaser with a powerful IDE at no cost. Below are the instructions, if you find any problems please let me know. Read More

Game development comes in all shapes and sizes. I’ve interviewed mostly independent developers from small companies in the past. Today I have an interview with Asher Einhorn who has worked on a billion dollar franchise as a game designer. However, he did not start out as a game designer, read on to find out more. Read More

We’ve started using Git for our Unity3D projects and this tutorial describes the best way to set up a Unity3D project to use Git for source control as well as some best practices. In the past we’ve used SVN and Mercurial as well and so far we’ve found Git to be the best option.

After one month of use, it’s time I write up my thoughts on the Surface Pro 3. I have two main uses for the device. First as a replacement for my iPad when sitting on the couch. Second as a replacement for my MacBook Air while out of the office, primarily in meetings to take notes or at coffee shops to write blogs, chat with people and do some light coding.

Now that we’re wrapping up work on Battle Group 2 we’ve begun planning out our next major project. I’ve briefly spoken about this previously and today I’m going to share some further discussions that have come out of our planning. The main theme revolves around creating enough content for a game with a small development team. With three main developers (a programmer, a designer and an artist) and a project timeframe of 12 months we need to make smart decisions about how we will create enough content for our game. I see the same problem crop up with a lot of other indie friends and I thought I’d give my thoughts on the subject.

Epic recently announced that they are making a new version of Unreal Tournament using Unreal Engine 4 (UE4). Today I will talk about why this is one of the best announcements for game developers (especially students) in a long time. The announcement was enough to get me to purchase a license to UE4 and review whether to continue using Unity for our next project or whether it’s time to make the move to UE4.

Facebook just announced they will be acquiring Oculus (developers of the Rift) for $2B ($400M in cash, $1.6B in stock). The internet is ablaze with almost unanimous displeasure about this announcement and I’d like to dig into why, despite an initial surprised reaction, I am happy about this acquisition.